have been waiting for someone to pick up Nick Drake's mantle and carry on the tradition of hushed, haunted folk-rock.

prefer songwriting that sets a mood and merely hints at some deeper, mysterious story.

think an album really can't have too many instruments, as long as it's tastefully done.

The backstory: Call me "male," but I just don't get the whole "Twilight" phenomenon. I have nothing against the book, movie or their fans — except for the way they seem to eclipse any music with which they come into contact. For example, you can't listen to English alt-rock band Muse without being accused of being some sort of Twihard (is that really what they're called?) simply because it is Stephanie Meyer's favorite band. (By the way, Muse's bombastic 2006 album, "Black Holes and Revelations," just barely missed the cut for this series.)

Likewise, indie-folk project Iron & Wine has been tainted with the sparkle of "Twilight" mania thanks to actress Kristen Stewart, who selected the final track off "The Shepherd's Dog" for the prom scene in last year's movie adaptation. Dang it, Kristen, why couldn't you have hand-picked some teen-pop song by the Jonas Brothers or whoever for the soundtrack, rather than a beautiful accordion-drenched waltz that previously we music snobs had all to ourselves?

Sub PopIron & Wine's Sam BeamI'll give this to Stewart, though: Much like the proverbial handsome, caring, abstinent boyfriend who also turns out be a vampire, there is some darkness and menace lurking beneath hushed, sad melodies of "The Shepherd's Dog." That painting of the ghoulish dog on the album cover is just the beginning. Read through the album's lyrics you'll find all kinds of southern gothic imagery: snakes in garden walls, buzzards in the trees, crows in the cornfield, cold winds blowing, "woolly wild hair," broken bones, cemeteries, witches and, repeatedly, dogs. I count nine dog references, not including the album title.

Most Iron & Wine performances nowadays involve a full band, but the name effectively is an alias for Sam Beam, the undisputed beard champeen of indie rock. Beam recorded this album in his current home of Austin, Texas, but he is a South Carolina native and was living in Miami at the time of his breakthrough, 2002's "The Creek Drank the Cradle." A film professor, he started making demos in his basement with a four-track recorder. (His trademark hushed vocals were supposedly a result of him recording at night and trying not to wake his four daughters upstairs.) The recordings started to circulate, eventually capturing the attention of Sub Pop Records.

Glide Magazine"Creek" won a lot of fans with its minimalist, low-fi style. Beam has been slowly moving away from it ever since, adding more instruments and textures with each release. "The Shepherd's Dog" seems to have benefited, in particular, from Beam's 2005 collaboration with Tex-Mex rockers Calexico , the fantastic seven-track EP "In the Reins." Like Calexico's best work, "The Shepherd's Dog" is a melting pot of musical traditions. The percussion sounds West African. Sitar renders a bit of Southeast Asian influence. Calexico returns to provide some Latin-flavored horns. Slide guitar conjures up some good ol' American bluesy swamp-rock. "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)" has hints of reggae, dub and enough funk to be mistaken for the theme song to some forgotten '70s cop drama. Yet none of these disparate elements sounds jarring or out of place. It's all part of a now-fully developed Iron & Wine sound.

My two cents: I wasn't one of the people who fell in love with Beam's early, sparse demos, so his shift toward increasingly complex arrangements doesn't bother me. In fact, it helped bring me on board. "In the Reins" was my entry point, but "The Shepherd's Dog" is just as strong and twice as long.

Someone else probably said it better: "Beam's voice lurks, fuzzy and thick, behind busier instrumentation; for the first time, language is subservient to sound. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Beam admits to finding 'spiritual inspiration' in Tom Waits' 1983 opus Swordfishtrombones, and while The Shepherd's Dog never mimics Waits' famed chainsaw-in-a-trashcan aesthetic, it's not difficult to hear what Beam is getting at: The Shepherd's Dog is noisier, more layered, less comfortable and less linear than anything Iron and Wine has released to date." — Amanda Petrusich for Paste

Moment that kills me every time: "And we'll undress beside the ashes of the fire / our tender bellies are wound around in baling wire / all the more a pair of underwater pearls / than the oak tree and its resurrection fern" (from "Resurrection Fern").

What does it all mean? I don't have a clue. But you can't say that Beam's lyrics don't provoke vivid images.

If you listen to just one track, make sure it's ... : "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." Hey, if it's good enough for the "Twilight" soundtrack ...